Posted
by
timothy
on Friday March 26, 2010 @01:00AM
from the you-must-enjoy-our-obnoxious-messages dept.

palmerj3 writes "The popular Facebook Purity greasemonkey script (now renamed Fluff Buster Purity) has been used by thousands to rid their Facebook feeds from the likes of Mafia Wars, Farmville, and other annoying things. Now, Facebook is threatening the developer of this script. Does Facebook have the right to govern their website's design and functionality once it's in the browser?"

You have to consider the American legal system. After they're done threatening legal action, then they'll drag him into court. It won't be a one-hearing thing either. It'll span years. They may get a court order that he can't develop nor distribute such software until the conclusion of the case.

Say he wins in court. He can continue to distribute his software. That's assuming he can afford legal representation for that long. Most normal people can't financially handle a prolonged court case, so even if he started fighting it from the start, he'd run out of funds and do exactly what they tell him to.

If he loses in court, it'll cost him an absolute fortune. They can hire better lawyers, and keep it tied up in court for years. Ok, now he has to stop distributing in the future (since they probably got the court order to not distribute for the duration of the court case, he'll be faced with fines, and probably Facebooks legal fees.

So his choices are to stop, and accept it, or to fight it and spend every penny he has in court.

Someone like Facebook doesn't mind spending the money to drag it through court. It's "encouragement" for others not to do the same thing.

Mod parent up. This is precisely what is wrong with the American legal system. Even if you do no wrong, companies and corporations can drag you through the legal system and exhaust any funds you have trying to defend yourself.

Even. If. You. Have. Done. Nothing. Illegal.

Rampant abuse by shady lawyers doesn't help either, since they get paid no matter who wins a case.

Very true.. the only thing we can to is Streisand Effect it as much as possible to help slap Facebook in the face. Maybe even set up a dedicated group resenting this move. Who knows, they might get the point. But it looks like we're seeing Microsoft's grubby little fingers in FB policy again.

depending on the state the developer is sued in/resides in he can file a SLAPP motion. This allows a judge to consider the merit of the case pre-trial and either dismiss or allow the case to go forward. If the case goes forward the fact that the SLAPP was not upheld is not permissible as evidence.

It's a powerful tool for the little guy and was developed for just this reason. Also, some states allow for a "SLAPP-back" provision thus he may get some income from this.-nB

Also, if Facebook wins, it will set a precedence. It will mean that potentially, anything that modifies a website from what the website author produces will be illegal.

This means all greasemonkey scripts and AdBlock Plus/other ad blocking technologies as these modify a sites look from what is intended.

It may also be applicable to mashup sites that take content from other sites and combine it, although this is different to the above, so would need to be tested in court.

It could also mean that developers are less likely to innovate in these areas for fear of being sued. There is always the possibility of being sued, but having this as a precedence would increase that chance.

There are some options, though.

If I were the developer, I would seek help from the FSF and/or try to find a lawyer willing to do the case pro-bono.

FSF could take over his legal cost. And then facebook is fucked, because the publicity combined with the probability that FSF would not drop the issue, would force them to accept and put them in a bad light. The question is could in such a case the FSF try to get the judge facebook to pay for their lawyer cost if facebook lose, which they would do.

As long as this is about being able to modify the website once it hits the browser, and not about simple trademark infringement (this being/. and it being almost lunch, I don't intend to RTFA:) then I should think the browser developers would also want to back this guy up. It would decimate a lot of plugins, and even functionality such as resizing text, serving your own custom css, disabling javascript/flash/etc might fall within the scope of this, so it has massive implications.

Actually it seems that the case is entirely about him using their trademark in the name of his script (which is why it has been renamed now). The EFF would just shrug and tell him that a) they're within their rights to defent their trademark and b) they actually don't even have much of a choice about it.

The beauty about not making money off of it is you can just post the code somewhere and stop hosting it, let it go viral. Facebook has to face the fact that people are still using the site but just don't want to see some certain updates. I bet if someone came up with a game that the object was to put your hand over the screen in the area of a Mafia Wars update that it would violate / hurt Facebook's feelings and you (or I guess I would) get a lawyer sending me junk.

You have to consider the American legal system. After they're done threatening legal action, then they'll drag him into court. It won't be a one-hearing thing either. It'll span years. They may get a court order that he can't develop nor distribute such software until the conclusion of the case.

I am not very familiar with the legal system so I will post my question here:

In the scenario you posted above, could it happen in reverse?

Say... a class action suit suing Facebook for infringing on the Users' Rights, since the greasemonkey thing is taking place on users' browsers, with nothing to do with Facebook's server site.

Facebook probably has a valid complaint. If you follow the links all the way to the author's page, you will note that he calls it "Fluff Busting Purity, also known as F*** B*** Purity" and he continues to use the F*** B*** and F.B. terms throughout. It's pretty obviously just a smack in their "face." If he wants to avoid lawsuits, he should just name it "mysocialnetwork purity" or something completely unrelated to FB. Then they could do nothing about it.

I disagree. Facebook doesn't really have a claim of infringement, any more than Paramount has a claim against the book "The Science of Star Trek". It refers to the protected name without claiming ownership or competing in the same market. All the site and the script comments need, really, is a disclaimer that it is not in any way associated with Facebook or their related properties.

Facebook already got Streisanded here. By grasping at the only available straw (the name), they've helped the script get noted by the Slashdotters, and it will be impossible to stop now. Even if the original script site is ordered removed, multiple branches will be created, since they can't forbid the underlying code.

Because they haven't done worse before? Facebook is a company that has a long history of unethical and annoying practices. It is a good tool but I constantly find myself wishing that my friends were on some other site.

You can hide all news feed posts from a certain application without using any addons. I don't see why they would be against this. I half-expected the "going after" him in the headline was to offer him a job before reading the summary.

Once it's in your browser, it's just a bunch of well formed data. These days almost any browser has extensions that may inadvertently modify this data, even without getting into specific tools like Greasemonkey.

If they really feel that strongly about a topic, they could try to obfuscate the data somehow, to make it more difficult to write such an extension. This would not be too hard on their part, though obviously more computationally expensive.

Of course they don't, but it doesn't matter because the developer can't possibly afford to defend himself so he'll comply because it doesn't matter if you're right if you're homeless. I wish judges were a little more liberal with SLAPP summary judgments against litigious corporations.

I don't see how this is any different than running noscript, or redirecting entries in your host file to 127.0.0.1... Even if this does go to court, I doubt Facebook would come out on top. Explaining to someone how browser content can be modified on the fly using GreaseMonkey might be a little tricky. No harm, no foul. Good luck Facebook, you money-hoarding bastards.

loopback is messy, use 0.0.0.0 instead. No connections to your own host, i actually run a simple http webserver on my machine.

Huh? Unless you've configured your webserver to only bind to specific addresses, then 0.0.0.0 is practically the same as loopback.Try it yourself - "ssh 0.0.0.0" (or just "ssh 0" - does the same thing with a lot less typing).

You don't let me export my data directly. You play games threatening to disable my account if I try to export the data by using a 3rd party script. Your employees are able to access my private information easily. I just hate logging into your website these days.

I'm going to delete my Facebook account. I can hear how my friends are doing by calling them once in a while.

And you'll find yourself with a shitload of newly free hours in the day in which you can do all sorts of stuff. Write a book. Write some free software. Learn a new language. You'll amaze yourself with just how much you can achieve in just one hour extra a day.

You can't delete your Facebook account unless you contact them with a (good) lawyer. You can only disable it, which only stops the emails. Your account remains accessible to everyone and, of course, every last shred of information about you remains in their database.

If you really want to get out of Facebook completely try to commit suicide: http://suicidemachine.org/ [suicidemachine.org]
Facebook tried to fight them, so here is some more Streisand effect for you.:)

Whatever you do, don't delete your account. That just gives FB a snapshot of your current profile to keep for all eternity. If you want FB to keep as little data on you as possible, it's really quite simple although it requires patience. Gradually remove all information and apps from your FB profile, in the end leave only the bare minimum that's required to keep the profile alive. Then leave it that way for a while, at least a year or two. Then delete the account.

FB can't possibly keep backups of every state of your profile and eventually they will be overwriting your older data with your updated and reduced profile footprint. Eventually this means they will have little data on you. Do it gradually, so it does not trip un-known snapshots of your profile which might be saved for longer.

If they consider it valuable information of COURSE they can, duh. If Mozy can backup unlimited data for $5/month then obviously valuable business data that takes almost no storage can be backed up indefinitely.

Gradually remove all information and apps from your FB profile, in the end leave only the bare minimum that's required to keep the profile alive.

I remember watching a video of a Facebook developer giving a presentation on their data storage architecture. I can't find the video, but the gist of it was that they use a homegrown flat file structure for archiving data which includes image data. External to the archives is an index which points to offsets into the archive files. New data is appended at the end and deleted data gets dereferenced, so the deleted data still resides inside the archive. The developer even mentioned that it was possible to recover the deleted data and then proceeded to speek a little on the privacy concerns because technically the data persists forever because they don't run jobs to condense the archives. This is non-intuitive to even well informed users.

Thats weird. Here in Poland you can ask company/whoever to delete your personal data and they have to comply. And I mean DELETE, not stop displaying. It means no backup, not on paper, not anywhere.If you don't comply with such request, you will be forced to stop using ALL your personal data storage, in with case if Facebook had (they do?) some data center in Poland, they couldn't use it anymore, at least not for personal data.

Seems like a common sense for me, keeping snapshots of personal data even tho that person doesn't want you to? What the shit?

even the mention of this story will upset their pr in dev community A LOT. we web developers, contrary to some who are developing for more closed platforms like ipod, do NOT like being herded, goaded, or ordered about. this will have consequences.

Can I not telnet to facebook.com on port 80 and make a request by hand? Sorry, but their copyright ends after they distribute a URI over HTTP. What I do with the response is my prerogative. My browser does anything it wants to with your data... even if I'm not using a browser to connect to tcp/80 at the time.

Maybe you should look up the meaning of "copyright". Then maybe you even realise that this whole story has nothing to do with copyrights. And also that copyright doesn't end with giving you a copy of that data.

A while back, there was a company that was editing copyrighted material and distributing their edits. I'm too lazy to look it up here on Slashdot, but you could go buy an R-rated movie from them and they would cut out the appropriate naughty bits to make it a G-rated movie which they would send to you. Needless to say, the studios shrieked to high heaven and the courts shut it down.

So, if I create a webpage and copyright it and you create something that modifies the copyrighted material and distributes it to the user, could we say that you have violated my copyright? With software to rip DVDs and such coming under fire, the courts seem to be saying that, "Yes, you can write your own tool to do it for your own personal use and we can't do anything about it. But if you try to distribute a tool which helps people violate copyright, you're in trouble."

For example, it's perfectly legal for one to save backups of their movies for personal use. However, if a DVD is at all encrypted, then its backup must maintain the encryption (such as using blank DVDs or saving to ISO).

However, copyright has nothing to do with this. If I buy a book or a newspaper, I am not allowed to copy it and give it to others; but there is nothing preventing me from taking a pair of scissors to it and removing sections I do not want to read. I could tear out every other page and burn it if I wanted to.

I really fail to see how this is any different, except that I am instructing a piece of software to do it for me.

I have a Facebook account that I signed up with bogus information to check something out once, but I don't remember which email I used to sign up or my password. However, I do happen to have a brother in college who extensively uses Facebook to connect to his campus' "scene." He is not one of those [mean adjective] people who plays stupid Facebook games and spams everyone with them. I think he'll enjoy knowing about this, and I know many of his college friends despise the annoying Facebook games. So, as a result of their attack on this developer who is breaking no laws, I am reading this/. post and my word of this wondrous script will be heard directly, and indirectly, but many Facebook users. Congratulations Facebook, you just shot yourself in the foot to spite your face (that's how it goes right?).

They aren't making him remove the script. The summary (and the script's author's site) are misleading.

This is purely a trademark issue. Initially the guy called his script Facebook Purity, a clear violation of FB's trademark. He changed the name to Fluff Buster Purity but also still markets it as F***B*** Purity, which is again a violation of Facebook's trademark, albeit a little more tenous.

If he just changes the name to something else there will be no issue. Noone is forcing him to take down his script, he just has to rename it to something that doesn't violate Facebook's trademark. Facebook are being no more evil than the Mozilla corporation who tightly control the Firefox trademark, even though the software itself is open source (hence Iceweasel etc and other silly names for adaptations of the software).

He changed the name to Fluff Buster Purity but also still markets it as F***B*** Purity, which is again a violation of Facebook's trademark, albeit a little more tenous

Tenuous is the understatement of the century. I am not a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe there is anything in trademark law that grants such broad rights (on any combination of two words with initials F and B). If it does, I guess Microsoft owns My Wiener.

On your computer, running an 'app'/'script' on your browser on your computer with your bandwidth.
Its all local.
All I can suggest is a firefox web2.0 edition.
To the web presents a perfect clean firefox with all all options running, to you the user its script ready and never shall the two layers meet;).
As for facebook, we the net using population cannot help your profit dreams.
Unless you build a wall with a password and pay per play entry- your 'experience' is open for all on any browser.

Instead of threatening the dude for writing the Greasemonkey script, they should maybe be thinking about why people want to use this script in the first place. If a major portion of your website users find part of your site to be that effing annoying, then fixing that portion of your website to be less annoying is a more important issue than the existence of a Greasemonkey script. Facebook needs to go shopping at the Clue Factory Outlet.

Facebook has inbuilt "ignore this"-feature. Every post has an X on the top-right corner, click it, and you can choose do you want to ignore application or the user who spams your newsfeed (in case you don't want to lose him/her from your friendlist). I did this months ago, and since then I've forgotten that Mafia Wars even exist.

However, there are relatively few programs that spam the news-feeds, and I find that "x became a fan of y"-posts are usually quite useful in later communication with the mentioned person. For this reason I don't see why (1.) the script has been written nor (2.) why Facebook would be interested about script with such a narrow potential user-base, particularly as this doesn't seem to cut into their ad-money.

I see no details in the article. Looking at the developer's site [site50.net], it seems their actions are:

- Shutting down the facebook profile associated with the script. This is poor behaviour, but entirely within their rights: it's their web site, if they don't want to support stuff like this it is their choice to do so.- Threaten to take legal action to seize control of a domain called "facebookplus.org", which the author claims is entirely unrelated to him.

So, what's the big fuss about? The former is annoying, but hardly "threatening to close him down"; the second appears to be a case of mistaken identity which will go away if he ignores it. Or is there some other threat I haven't seen?

Facebook isn't trying to stop people from writing scripts that modify the content of the page (get rid of spam), and if it were to go to court, this would not be the subject of the court case. The actual complaint is a trademark violation one for using the term "Facebook", and later, "FB". It also seems their lawyers are unable to do a whois search because they are also demanding he turns over a domain to them that he doesn't actually own.

However, the "cease and desist" (from the scant information that's actually avaialble if you go to the author's web page) is solely about trademark issues. Nothing about what the script actually does. This may or may not be heavy handed, I don't know - but what I can tell is that it has nothing at all to do with what the script does, merely what it was called.

I agree, I don't think they have any legal right to stop the dev from creating a completely user-side tool. The only thing they could do (IMO) is block its functionality for users.

Facebook is getting more and more annoying. It's unfortunate how much of a deathchoke they have on social networking (I don't know very many people without facebook; it is my main mode of online communication).

It's known that an IPO is inevitable; if their motives have been in question now, it won't be when public stockholders are involved.

Time to hop on the next social bandwagon. How hard can it be to host asite with 400,000,000 unique VISITORS a month?

One of the nice things compared to google buzz is that you don't get a ton of farmville spam whenever you log in there. You don't get much else either, which some people might view as a down side, but if other sites get more annoying things might pick up over there. You can hide a lot of the spam in Facebook now, but that just seems to make the game developers branch out into similar annoying games.

Then we talked about other Facebook games, games for the Wii and how his dog ate the sensor bar, talked about MMOs a bit (He'd never played one, didn't really "get" them, eh, whatever) and then HIS boss came in the room and we talked about work stuff because lunch was drawing to a close.

So, what's the name of that site, mate? Anonymouscowardnumbersixpointeightthreebillion-giveortake.com?
Sorry, Captian Luddite, but you're confusing the medium with the content. I'm 50 years old and have prodigiously developed abilities with Google Fu. After over a year of badgering to join Facebook—which I countered with arguments similar to yours, such as:

"I've been online and had my own sites and blogs and photosharing galleries for over a dozen years...why can't all these people find me!?"

—I finally relented. Since doing so about a year ago, I've reconnected with a ton of old friends I couldn't find any other way.

As a shining example, two of us had an idea to start an ACTUAL website to gather material on musicians & bands we knew from our area, and from days and decades gone by. Despite sending tons of emails, and making tons of phone calls pleading for friends to get on board with the idea, nobody wanted to go to the trouble of contributing to it. I was even offering to send out pre-paid mailers for them to send me stuff to scan and audio/video material to digitize. It was just too much trouble for them

So, my friend and I started a Facebook group hoping to create a historic record of bands, clubs, & musicians from the Central Pennsylvania area, and in less than 2 months 360+ old friends and acquaintances have found each other again, to share hundreds of photos and stories, and to get back together to jam, or to go see each others' current bands.

I could also regale you with tales of smaller BBQs, ballgames, golf outings and beer bashes organized and thrown, of old loves rekindled, of new jobs found, of dogs and cats saved from being euthanized, of rare car parts bought & sold, of bands booking money-making tours in markets they would have otherwise never reached, of small group renunion cruises and vacations taken, and many more.

But apparently, you've explored it all enough to know that Facebook, MySpace and other SocNet sites are just for the pathetic, or the tech—challenged, or the kids...so good luck, and have fun with your decision to dismiss them out—of—hand. In the meantime, there are a whole shtload of us who are having tones of fun, both online and in meatspace, precisely because of them.

I used to run with a real gang. We used Face-Mash. the hot social networking system built around drugs, guns, and alcohol. It brought us all together to enjoy our common bond - beating people close to death, robbing, stealing, etc.

No one is questioning whether or not he should or shouldn't be on Facebook. It's not for some people. Not everything is (for example, while I use Facebook, I just dont' see as much point to Twitter and have never sent a tweet in my life - doesn't mean I degrade those who do use it though).

The primary concern was over his accusation that if you're on Facebook you should start hanging out with adults - the implication being that adults don't use Facebook. That's absolutely off-base and inaccurate. I'm 28,

...every other country than the US, they will accomplish what, exactly?

Any attempts to enforce EULAs would be laughed out of court in the rest of the world. Consumer rights authorities in the EU are currently investigating whether it even is legal to present EULAs to consumers since there's currently a court case pending in Finland where someone was blocked from using a free service because they had filled out bogus info about themselves and the EULA "obliged" users to disclose real info.

If they just stick a clause in the EULA the prohibits people from doing just that, they could stop it. Although I am not sure if they could go after the author, just those who use it. How they would detect that, I'm not sure, but I know there are a few sites that can detect AdBlock.

Firefox extensions can be detected [ckers.org] through Javascript, including Greasemonkey [blogspot.com]. I don't think they would be able to detect specific Greasemonkey script though and the extension detection can be defeated.

As to the morality of blocking a client with a specific feature set: how many people here block IE from their site ? There are a lot of precedents, you don't need to put it in the EULA. It has always been the webserver's business what code he serves to which clients.

To some extent. Ars Technica recently ran a short experiment where content was hidden if it looked like someone was running an ad blocker.

Note that these detection scripts are generally like 4 lines of javascript that depend on the fact that ad blockers look for urls patterns like "ads/*". If any site actually started seriously doing this, it would be easily worked around and probably turn into an arms race that the site would lose.